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Downloaded From: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and Many Other Open Repositories General Editor Vicki L. Crawford Advisory Board Lewis V. Baldwin Randal Jelks Vanderbilt University University of Kansas Emilye Crosby Barbara McCaskill State University of New York, Geneseo University of Georgia Adam Fairclough Kathryn L. Nasstrom Leiden University University of San Francisco Robert M. Franklin Rev. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock Emory University Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia Françoise N. Hamlin Brown University Prophet of Discontent Martin Luther King Jr. and the Critique of Racial Capitalism • Andrew J. Douglas Jared A. Loggins © ¢£¢¤ by the University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia §£¨£¢ www.ugapress.org Some rights reserved CC BY-NC-ND ¬is work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives ®.£ International License. Note to users: A Creative Commons license is only valid when it is applied by the person or entity that holds rights to the licensed work. Works may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) to which the rightsholder in the work cannot apply the license. It is ultimately your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-ND/®.£/ Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors. Library of Congress Control Number: ¢£¢£¶®··¤¶ ¸¹º»: ¶¼·£·¢£§¨£¤¨® (e-book: open access edition) ¸¹º»: ¶¼·£·¢£§¨£¤¼¤ (hardback: alk. paper) ¸¹º»: ¶¼·£·¢£§¨£¤·· (paperback: alk. paper) ¸¹º»: ¶¼·£·¢£§¨£§££ (e-book: standard edition) is book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: BY-NC-ND. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identier (DOI): https://doi.org/./ We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. Acknowledgments ix ¾ “¬e Trouble Is . .”: On Critique and Tradition ¤ à “¬e Other America”: On the Method of Dissatisfaction ¤¼ “Something Is Wrong with Capitalism”: On the Revolution of Values §§ ÄÅ “Showdown for Nonviolence”: On Black Radicalism and the Antipolitical ÆÆ Ä “Liberated Grounds on Which to Gather”: On Black Study and the AÇerlives of King’s Critique ¼® Notes ¶Æ Bibliography ¤¤¼ Éà ÊË ¬is project began as an open-ended search in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection. It has grown into a book that we hope will speak to a new era of movement activism. We made Ínal revisions in the summer of ¢£¢£, as mass protests erupted in the United States and quickly spread worldwide. ¬e tremendous groundswell of organizing energies, aimed at abolishing many of the same structural injustices that King fought against, breathed life into this book when the weight of the moment made writing especially diÏcult. We must Írst acknowledge those who have been killed, those who have been injured or jailed for protesting, and those who have taken to the streets in demonstration and have been lucky enough to return home unharmed, able to Íght another day. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Vicki Crawford, our Morehouse col- league who supported this project from its infancy and provided much-needed counsel as it matured. Many others in the Morehouse community have enriched our work: Sam Livingston, Kipton Jensen, Cynthia Hewitt, Frederick Knight, Matthew Platt, Adrienne Jones, Oumar Ba, Levar Smith, Lawrence Carter, Preston King, Patrick Darrington, and Jaeden Johnson. Beyond Morehouse, we owe thanks to Paul Taylor, Brandon Terry, Andrew Valls, Da’Von Boyd, Bryan Garsten, Lawrie Balfour, Ryan Russell, Justin Brooks, Jen Rubenstein, Dan Henry, Shaibal Gupta, Babak Amini, Meghnad Desai, Justin Rose, Ferris Lupino, De’Jon Hall, Michelle Rose, Gauri Wagle, and Paul Guttierez. Portions of the project were presented at the annual meeting of the African-American In- tellectual History Society, the Yale Political ¬eory Workshop, the Brown Uni- versity Graduate Political Philosophy Workshop, and the University of Virginia Political ¬eory Colloquium. We thank the participants in those discussions for their helpful queries and suggestions. An earlier version of a portion of chapter three was the subject of the ¢£¤· Frantz Fanon Memorial Lecture at the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna, India, and subsequently published as “King, Marx, and the Revolution of Worldwide Value,” in Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, Inuences: A Critical Examina- tion on the Bicentenary, edited by Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto, and Babak Amini (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, ¢£¤¶), ¤Æ¶-¤¼¶. Another portion of ix x Acknowledgments chapter three, along with a small portion of chapter one, appeared in “Diagnos- ing Racial Capitalism,” in Fiy Years Since MLK, edited by Brandon M. Terry (Cambridge: MIT Press/Boston Review, ¢£¤·), ®£-®®. We thank Palgrave and Boston Review for permission to republish this material. At the University of Georgia Press, Walter Biggins, Lisa Bayer, and Nate Holly kept the project moving though personnel changes and the onset of a global pan- demic. Two anonymous reviewers provided expert, and very timely, feedback. And, of course, we thank our families: Marcie Dickson, and Juliana and Gen- evieve Douglas; Shari, Vernell, Justin Loggins, and Kimberly Wilson. “e Trouble Is . .” On Critique and Tradition e deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression. —Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go om Here? e black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. —Martin Luther King Jr., “A Testament of Hope” , , a week before he was killed in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. joined Stanley Levinson, Andrew Young, and several O other condants for an evening gathering at the New York City apart- ment of the singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte. Earlier that day, King had met with the poet Amiri Baraka in Newark, a city still reeling from the deadly riots of the previous summer. It was a city, King feared, that was poised to erupt all over again. At the time, King was working to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, what was to be a multiracial march on and occupation of Washington, D.C.: a mass demonstration meant to press the American peo- ple into a serious confrontation with material poverty. And in New York that evening, King was in a “surly mood.” He conded in Belafonte and others that Newark and his meeting with the militant Baraka had gotten to him, that su¥o- cating conditions there and an increasing willingness among the city’s youth to embrace violent resistance tactics were once again testing his long-haul strategy of nonviolent change. “I wholly embrace everything they feel,” King said of the militant contingent in Newark. “I have more in common with these young peo- ple than with anybody else in this movement. I feel their rage. I feel their pain. ¦ I feel their frustration. It’s the system that’s the problem, and it’s choking the breath out of our lives.” As Belafonte recalls of the conversation that evening, it was Andrew Young—the future U. S. Congressman and Ambassador to the United Na- tions—who unwittingly ratcheted up King’s anger. “I don’t know, Martin,” Young said. “It’s not the entire system. It’s only part of it, and I think we can x that.” King was having none of it. “I don’t need to hear from you, Andy,” he clapped back. “You’re a capitalist, and I’m not. e trouble is that we live in a failed system. Capitalism does not permit an even ©ow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. at’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”ª It was a striking conversation. Even more striking, perhaps, is that a simi- lar conversation could have taken place among Black activists and organizers a half-century later. It could well have happened, for example, in July of «¬, when the system literally choked the life out of Eric Garner on Staten Island, or in August of that year, when the system cut down Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, or in November of that year, when the system murdered -year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, or in April of the next year, when the system took Freddie Gray for one nal “rough ride” through the streets of Baltimore. It could have happened in the spring of ««, when the system once again choked the life out of a Black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, and deployed mil- itarized police and posse units on Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Ahmaud Arbery in King’s home state of Georgia. Fi±y years a±er the system made a mar- tyr of King, his thinking and perspective resonate in chilling ways. King was killed at a time when rage, pain, and frustration were widespread in American life, when the con©uence of racial and economic inequity had set urban ghet- toes a©ame.
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